Many pitchers, who are professional athletes, fit and in shape, go an entire season without getting a hit. But even Sandy Koufax, one of the notoriously worst of them, would occasionally get a hit. All that is required to get a hit is to get the bat on the ball and hit it fair, and a certain number will fall safely by pure chance. It’s statistically similar to now long you to roll dice to get doubles. You might get doubles on the first roll, or roll a dozen times trying. Even the best hitters sometimes hit a dozen fair balls without a safe hit.
The timing is the big part of the problem. The swing needs to start when the pitch(fastball) is only halfway and the window (pull foul to slice foul) is only 14 milliseconds.
You don’t need to time it. Your just need to start the swing based on the arm moving and hope they meet. With all of the shitty hitting pitchers in the history of baseball, the record for at bats in a carrer,or to start a career hitless is less than 70 IIRC. Not hundreds and hundreds.
It’s very hard to hit consistently, but getting one hit in hundreds of swings isn’t.
Remember that all of those pitchers had the experience of being pretty good hitters at the high school and college level before advancing far enough in their careers to no longer work on hitting. Our hypothetical player in this scenario won’t have even that advantage.
Why on earth would they all be good high school hitters? Some were just shit for hitting their whole lives.
Doubtful. Most pitchers playing in youth ball, including high school, play another position so they can play every game; they are usually excellent athletes, at least compared to the usual competition.
Have you ever stood in a batting cage and tried to hit plain fast balls? It is extremely difficult. A “reasonably fit” person doesn’t necessarily have the eye or ability to swing the bat to have a chance. If you said quite athletic person, perhaps eventually they’d luck into it. Eventually you might hit the ball by swinging randomly with your eyes closed.
A batting cage in no way resembles a pitcher. The timing is completely different.
Will Farrell actually fouled one off in his spring training stint and he was…45??
It’s not the impossibility you all are making it out to be given the OPs parameters.
Edit: I didn’t see ‘never played baseball before’…that changes things… Emily Litella : Never Mind.
This “a lifetime” stuff is nonsense.
We have a sample of people exactly like this; pitchers. Some can hit, but some MLB pitchers obviously don’t hit any better that a lot of ordinary Joes, and even the ones with no visible ability hit about .030 or .040 just by virtue of being healthy guys who can swing.
The OP adds the complication of “Never played baseball before.” If the guy HAD played baseball before I’d say the rough batting average you could expect of a 30-year-old athletic man would be .040 or .050. If the guy literally does not know how to swing the expected average will begin at .000 and climb as fast as he can be taught to swing, which, if we have an athletic 30 year old, could be done fairly swiftly.
[quote=“Dale_Sams, post:28, topic:794672”]
A batting cage in no way resembles a pitcher. The timing is completely different.
Will Farrell actually fouled one off in his spring training stint and he was…45??/QUOTE]
That was my point, hitting in a batting cage is a hell of a lot easier and that is tough. And fouling a ball off is also a hell of a lot easier. The ball and the bat have roughly the same diameter about three inches. That means if the center of the bat is within +/- three inches of the center of the ball you will make contact. To hit the ball squarely, you probably have at most a half of that or you will foul the ball back or into the ground. You also need to time the swing right so the ball goes between first and third. I’d say hitting a foul ball is about 5 to 10 times as likely as hitting a fair ball. And of course it has to be more than fair, you need to meet the ball more squarely than that to not either pop it up or beat it into the ground.
The OP did not say athletic. He said healthy. And most major league pitchers are or were when younger pretty athletic. The guys who pitch in high school ball and go on to the majors quite often played center field or short stop on the days they were not pitching, because they were very athletic as well as having strong arms. This is somewhat true of college ball as well. I believe your worst hitting pitchers are probably much better hitters than your average healthy guy. And if they practiced it more, they’d be quite a bit better.
This is absurd, hitting consistently as a major league batter is an extremely difficult skill, that, adjusting for variations in mound height, distance etc., is done by the best players ends up in 32-40% or so. but pretending that it is some comic book super human skill to hit one is just stupid.
I googled for exact number, and the longest streak to not get a hit is 57 games. And a full season of at bats is well well over 500 plate appearances. Do you really think that every pitcher; not average, not low percentile, but every single freaking pitcher, without one exception, who has ever played the game is that much better of a hitter than an average Joe that they will get one in less that 60 but Joe won’t get one in 600?
Baseball more than any other sport is ruled by the law of large numbers. Any decently physically capable person will get a hit in 1500 swings, acting like there is some uber-class of athletes that makes up baseball players separate from all other humans makes no sense.
If the pitcher is slinging it 100mph against a guy who has never played baseball before, the hitter had better start his swing while walking from the on deck circle.
mmm
There are several pitchers that have had decent careers and only managed 0.085 for their career batting average. That is despite playing in the NL and seeing professional pitchers dozens of times per year. That is probably a decent number for our average Joe. I’m terrible at stats but it seems to imply that on average they should get their first hit in their first 8 plate appearances (50% chance of at least 1 success in 8 attempts). The odds are long but not that terrible.
Not quite 1 in 12.
1 of 8 is a .125 average.
That would be scored as a fielder’s choice, which does not count as a hit.
My guess about the OP is that it’d probably take him half the season to get the first hit. After that he may get one or two more and end up batting .005 or something in that neighborhood.
This discussion reminds of the situation in a recent Braves-Mariners game. The Mariners’ closer had to bat in the 9th inning. (He pitched the last batter in the 8th and they wanted him on the mound in the 9th.) He just stood there in the box, never swung even though one of the pitches was right down the middle, and of course stuck out. He then got high fives when he returned to the dugout. Apparently they didn’t want him to risk injury by swinging the bat.
Of course, once in a great while that strategy totally works.
Still not a hit though.
Right, I was looking at it as a base percent chance so at each at bat the guy would have an 8.5% chance to get a hit and a 91.5% chance not to. After 8 at bats the odds of them not getting a hit is .915^8=49.1% so they’re more likely than not to get a hit in 8 at bats. At least I think that math is right.
In 12 at bats they only have a 1/3 chance of getting out every time.
One factor is how terrifying it is to be inches away from a ball traveling at 100 MPH. Someone with no experience may struggle even if physically gifted because he’s intimidated.
Some pitchers forced to bat (AL pitchers in a NL stadium) literally stand there without swinging. They’d rather get it over with and get out than swing and risk getting hurt/tired at the expense of their real job (pitching). I watched this happen just last week in a Mariners game. He struck out in 4 pitches (there was actually one ball) and went back to the dugout to congratulations on surviving (it was his first time ever “batting” in the majors).
Psst. I just mentioned that 3 posts above yours.
FFS you did. :smack: I can’t believe I didn’t see it.
Yeah we saw the same game and drew the same conclusion at least. 